The present invention relates generally to the management of a digital ecosystem through the creation and management of intelligent packets that enable computerized transactions using electronic and optically scanned paper documents. A lack of cultural, policy, process and technology interoperability and protected information sharing between organizations today has led to the failure of government institutions and business entities to enable efficient management of processes critical to their respective missions. Evidence of such lack of interoperability ranges from the infamous 9/11 attacks, where the intelligence institutions failed to identify and thwart terrorists, to relief efforts in the wake of hurricane Katrina, where the justice, education and healthcare institutions failed to adequately preserve and share records, to the day-to-day reality of American justice institutions at the federal and state levels routinely tolerating backlogs of millions of un-served federal, state and local arrest, search and bench warrants.
Even with the purported speed and virtually unlimited storage capacity of modern computers, networks, and the internet the “system” in its current state isn't working.
Information and transactions critical to public safety, homeland security, justice, education, healthcare, and other essential government institutions and services are routinely unavailable, delayed or lost due to a lack of interoperability between federal, state and local government jurisdictions and businesses on a number of levels. Business enterprises suffer a similarly lack of interoperability both internally and in relationships with suppliers, service providers, partners, distributors, and customers.
Succinctly stated, the problem is the inability to fluidly share critical information in real-time among government organizations at all levels and among appropriate business entities—while preserving the required levels of authority, security and privacy. Finding the proper balance between sharing critical information and maintaining the expected authority, privacy and security over that information is one of today's most pressing challenges.
The critical element that is lacking in harnessing modern computer power and networking connective to address these issues is a digital ecosystems that binds together government and business organizations into functional entities and digital ecosystem transactions that operate to bridge the gaps between these entities to allow them to function as a single, coherent system. Digital ecosystems and the digital ecosystem transactions that they can enable allow partners in government and business to act more quickly, assuredly, and decisively based on having the right information in the right context in order to make better decisions. In particular in justice, education, and healthcare ecosystems which affect the lives of virtually all men and women can benefit from the creation of ecosystems that enable these entities to act more quickly, assuredly, and decisively based on having the right information in the right context in order to make better decisions.
Efforts to find technical solutions to address the perceived need for a digital ecosystem have fallen short of the goal. In the past, developers have used object-oriented programming to enable more efficient programming and maintainability for such systems and have turned to hardware independent languages like JAVA. Subsequently, technology to facilitate communication among distributed objects across client-server lines has been enabled by the EnterpriseJavaBeans architecture.
However, there these technologies fall short of enabling a complete ecosystem in which disparate systems may work together effectively and transparently. Accordingly, government and business systems are leverageing the power of the Extended Markup Language (XML) protocol for process communication and data transmission between clients and servers and among servers. Thus, there is a need a clear need for a digital ecosystem architecture that can provide not only platform independence, but that accommodates highly abstracted metadata process for including user both electronic and historical paper-based documents through their creation, flow, approval, and retention cycles.
The current invention describes a unique technology platform that enables digital ecosystems and delivers digital ecosystem transactions to users in government and business.